by Colin Wilson
In his book Modern Psychic Experiences, Joe Cooper publishes most of these accounts, together with many more. A New Zealand medium named Dorothy described how she used to play with a ‘spirit’ girl called Mabel as a child, and how she had first seen fairies, who came from under plants. One day she came home to find her father unconscious on the floor—a gastric ulcer had perforated—and the fairies took charge and escorted her to the door of the doctor. Joe Cooper’s own niece Jo, in her thirties, described how, at the age of 16, she had seen three small men crouching on top of a wall.
When I wrote about the Cottingley fairies in Poltergeist, I also went to some trouble to find accounts of ‘real fairies’. I describe being interviewed on television at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival by a man called Bobbie (whose surname I forgot to note in my journal): in the pub next door he told me casually that the had once seen a gnome standing on the pavement outside a convent gate, and that it had ‘scared the hell out of him.’
My friend Marc Alexander, author of many books on the paranormal, told me a story of a friend in New Zealand called Pat Andrew, who claimed to have seen a pixie when he was 6. Years later, after seeing a stage hypnotist, Marc and Pat Andrew began experimenting with hypnosis on one another. Marc had no doubt that Pat Andrew was genuinely hypnotised, and one day decided to try and ‘regress’ him to the age at which he saw the pixie. The result was an amazing one-sided conversation that left Marc in no doubt whatever that, whether Andrew had really seen a pixie or not, he undoubtedly believed he had.
One of the most circumstantial accounts I know of an encounter with a pixie is recounted by another friend, Lois Bourne, in her book Witch Among Us. Lois is a ‘witch’ in the sense of possessing odd psychic powers, of whose reality I have not the slightest doubt. She is an extremely sensible and down-to-earth lady. And in her book, among many stories that psychical researchers will find credible enough, she tells a story that will obviously cause most readers to doubt her truthfulness. Staying on holiday at a cottage at Crantock, in Cornwall, she met another member of a ‘wicca’ coven, and spent an evening at her home. The woman’s husband, Rob, asked her if she would like to see a goblin. One appeared among the rushes of the millstream at Treago Mill, Cuberts Heath, every morning at sunrise, and if she wanted to see him, she had to be up early. The next morning Lois and her husband Wilfred joined Rob at the mill gate, and they crept up to the stream. ‘I have never been able to decide, and still cannot decide, whether I really saw that goblin, or if Rob made me see it . . . Whatever it was, there, sitting on a stone calmly washing his socks, was an elfin creature with a red hat, green coat and trews, one yellow sock on, and one in his tiny hands in the process of being washed. I remember thinking at the time in my sleepy befuddled but practical way ‘what an atrocious colour combination’. Suddenly he saw us and he disappeared . . . ‘Now do you believe me?’ asked Rob.’
I have known Lois for years. I may be gullible and she may be a liar, but I believe her. She is not the type to invent such a silly story. And her husband Wilfred—who also saw it—is not the type to support a downright lie.
As already mentioned, the poet W. B. Yeats had been convinced of the existence of fairies ever since he and Lady Gregory went from door to door collecting information from the local peasants. They recorded these interviews in a book called Visions and Beliefs in 1920. Evans Wentz concludes his Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by acknowledging: ‘we seem to have arrived at a point . . . where we can postulate scientifically . . . the existence of such invisible intelligences as gods, genii, daemons, all kinds of true fairies, and disembodied man . . .’ (By the latter he means ghosts). And he goes on to cite the very sound evidence for the existence of the poltergeist. George Russell (AE)—and Wentz—emphasise that these entities are seen only by ‘psychics’, and Russell believes that such beings are not ‘individuals’ in the human sense. ‘Theirs is a collective life, so unindividualised and so calm that I might have more varied thoughts in five hours than they would have in five years.’
When all this is taken into account, we may feel that the notion that Frances really saw fairies by the beck in Cottingley no longer seems quite so absurd.
1. For a longer account of Vlad the Impaler, see The Mammoth Book of True Crime 2.
1. ‘La Tradition Legendaire du Vampire en Europe’, in ‘Les Cahiers du G.E.R.F’ (Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherche sur La Fantastique’, Grenoble University of Languages and Letters, 1987.)
15
Standing Stones and Space Men
LETHBRIDGE, AS WE HAVE SEEN, was fascinated by the problem of ‘earth forces’, and the notion that they are responsible for the ‘sacredness’ of religious sites. He comments again and again on the fact that so many Christian churches are built on ancient pagan sites, and on that curious directive issued by Pope Gregory the Great that where possible, Christian churches should be built in these places. It could be, of course, that he was simply trying to recruit converts who happened to be attached to the ‘Old Religion’ of the witches. But there was almost certainly a second reason: that he recognised that certain places were chosen because the ground itself was ‘sacred. Stonehenge is an example; so is the Cornish circle of standing stones known as the Merry Maidens. In both these places, Lethbridge’s dowsing-rod detected powerful forces. When he placed his hand on a stone at the Merry Maidens, while he was using a dowsing pendulum with the other hand (a pendulum can be more sensitive than a dowsing-rod), he experienced a tingling force, not unlike an electric shock. He theorised that ancient priests had recognised this force in the earth, and had ordered the stones to be placed there to conduct the force—rather as an acupuncturist places the needles at the crossing points of certain ‘meridians’ in the body.
It is a pity that Lethbridge was unaware of the work of his predecessor Alfred Watkins, a Hereford brewer who had also been intrigued by ‘sacred places’. Half a century earlier, on June 30, 1921, Watkins was riding his horse across the hills near Bredwardine, and as he paused on a hilltop, he noticed something that excited him. He could see a number of straight tracks and ancient footpaths running across the countyside, and he now observed that they seemed to connect up old churches, standing stones and ancient mounds (known as tumps or tumuli). It struck him that what he was looking at was ancient man’s equivalent of a telecommunications system. Some of these tracks, he thought, were simply trade routes, while others must have some religious significance, since they connected sacred sites. He decided to call them ‘ley lines’, from the old word for an enclosed field.
It is, in fact, fairly easy to create a straight line that runs for miles across country, even if it has to go up hill and down dale. The technique is known as ‘ranging a line’, and it requires only three staves. The man constructing the path drives the first staff into the ground, and then closes one eye and looks beyond it to the hilltop—or whichever point he wishes to go towards. An assistant then places a second staff in line with the first. The third staff is placed further along still, in such a position that it is blotted out by the second. Then the first staff is pulled up, and the process continues.
The men who originally marked out these ‘old straight tracks’ were—Watkins thought—probably of priestly rank, and would carry a staff as a badge of office. This may explain the great hillside figure called the Long Man of Wilmington, who seems to be holding a long staff in either hand . . .
Watkins’s suggestion led to the formation of an ‘Old Straight Track’ club, whose members spent their weekends looking for new ley lines.
One of its members made an interesting and puzzling observation in the late 1930s—that, very often, two tracks ran parallel. But why should there be two tracks—like railway lines—when one would suffice? A retired solicitor named Guy Underwood found what he thought was the answer. He spent his retirement dowsing around stone circles, and he noticed that his dowsing-rod often showed two parallel tracks of some underground force running for miles. And when he examined ‘holy sites’—like S
tonehenge—he found many of these ‘double’ tracks (named by him ‘aquastats’). They seemed to be lines of some kind of magnetic force.
Watkins had never suspected that his straight tracks were anything but trade routes or tracks between churches. Now Underwood was suggesting that they followed lines of underground force. Moreover, at sacred sites, he found that these lines often formed a spiral. Ancient rock carvings all over the world display the same spiral pattern. Could this be because it is the obvious symbol for this sacred earth force?
In the 1960s—when the ‘occult revival’ was in full swing—another student of ancient monuments, John Michell, revived Watkins’ now forgotten ‘ley lines’. Oddly enough—or perhaps not so oddly, as it turned out—Michell began as a student of the strange phenomenon known as flying saucers or UFOs. These had leapt to international prominence in the late 1940s, after a businessman named Kenneth Arnold, flying his private aeroplane near Mount Rainier, in Washington State on June 24, 1947, had sighted nine shining disc-like objects flying in V formation. Other sightings poured in, and in Kentucky in January 1948, Captain Thomas Mantell, piloting a Mustang, tried to follow a ‘flying saucer’ to twenty thousand feet and fell out of the sky. From then on, there were thousands of UFO sightings, and books about them poured off the presses—to the disgust of orthodox scientists, who regarded it all as mass hysteria.
What John Michell noted was that many of the places where flying saucers were reported were also ‘places of ancient sanctity’, and that in many cases their flight path seemed to follow ley lines. This led Michell to re-examine the evidence of Watkins and Underwood. He also noticed that in Ireland ley lines are called ‘fairy paths’, and have been known since time immemorial. His views were first propounded in a book called The Flying Saucer Vision (1967), and then, two years later, in A View Over Atlantis. It suggested that the religions of ancient man were based upon a recognition of the magnetic forces of the earth, which were closely connected with its fertility. Ancient man, he believed, had his own form of non-technological civilisation based upon these sacred forces. Glastonbury was one of the sites of this ancient religion.
But why Atlantis? The Atlantis of legend was an ancient civilisation described by Plato, an enormous island in the Atlantic ocean which had been swallowed up by some gigantic catastrophe nine thousand years earlier. Scholars had dismissed it as a myth, although one modern archaeologist, Professor A.G. Galanopoulos, had suggested that Atlantis was really the island of Santorini, north of Crete, which had been destroyed in a gigantic volcanic explosion about 1500 BC; Galanopoulos thought that the Egyptian priests from whom Plato got the story had accidentally multiplied all their figures by ten, including the date of the catastrophe. What Michell was suggesting is that the story of Atlantis indicates that there had been a complex civilisation long before those that are known to history, and that folk memories of this civilisation survive in legends of the ‘Golden Age’. Primitive religions were an interaction between man and nature, an interaction that modern man has totally forgotten.
One effect of Michell’s book was to turn Glastonbury into a place of pilgrimage for hippies; another was to create a new interest in ley lines and ‘earth magic’.
Lethbridge, living quietly in Devon, knew none of this. Yet his own studies had brought him remarkably close to the same ideas. He had noticed, to begin with, how often churches called after St Michael are found along the lines that join sacred places. This, he believed, was because the Christians had taken over pagan sites, and replaced the Celtic god Lugh (or Lucifer), the sun god and light-bringer, with Lucifer’s traditional enemy St Michael.
Lethbridge’s interest in St Michael and in the standing stones that so often seemed to be associated with him (or with the sun god) led him to wonder about another ancient mystery: the legends of the great ‘war in heaven’ between St Michael and the ‘dragon’. Was it possible that this was also something more than a primitive myth?
Lethbridge began from the same question that had intrigued John Michell: why were there legends of a ‘golden age’? What made men of the bronze or iron age—who were, after all, so much better off than their forefathers – look back nostalgically to some idyllic past?
He was also fascinated by the passage in the sixth chapter of Genesis about the sons of God finding the daughters of men desirable, and fathering children on them. It adds that ‘there were giants in the earth in those days’, and that the daughters of men bore children to them. And, since he was so interested in the question of St Michael and his enemy the dragon, he wondered about the passage in Revelation 12 about a ‘war in heaven’, when Michael and his angels fought against the dragon.
The solution that suggested itself to him struck him as so preposterous that he delayed publishing it for a long time. It was that the ‘sons of God’ were visitors from space, and that the ‘war in heaven’ had actually taken place, and that an atomic bombardment accounted for the heavy cratering of Mars and the moon. As to the standing stones—like Stonehenge and the Merry Maidens: was it not possible that they might have served as ‘beacons’ for the space craft to home in on?
In short, what Lethbridge suggests is that the ‘golden age’—Michell’s Atlantis—was an age in the remote past when visitors from space had landed on earth and taught human beings a great deal about the use of technology. The result was a diffusion of this knowledge over the surface of the earth, which accounted for the similarity of artifacts found all over the world.
Because Lethbridge was such a loner, he was unaware that he had simply tuned in to the ‘spirit of the age’, and was raising questions that had occurred to other speculative thinkers. Lethbridge was, in fact, devastated to discover just before his death that his ‘space men’ idea had been suggested by the Swiss writer Erich von Daniken, in a book called Memories of the Future (1967) and translated as Chariots of the Gods?, which suggested that all kinds of ancient artifacts and monuments—including the Great Pyramid—were the work of space men. In fact, as early as 1958, a writer named George Hunt Williamson had written a book called Secret Places of the Lion, in which he declared that visitors from space had landed eighteen million years ago, and had dedicated themselves since then to the evolution of mankind. Pauwels and Bergier repeated the suggestion in their Morning of the Magicians (1960). The same idea was given popular currency in 1968 in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
If Lethbridge had had time to study Daniken more carefully, he would have felt less chagrined. Although Daniken achieved international best-sellerdom with his books on ‘space visitors’, scholarly analysis revealed that most of his ideas were simply absurd guesses or distortions of fact. Chariots of the Gods? describes how, in the Assyrian Epic of Gilgamesh, there is an episode in which the hero Enkidu is borne upward in the claws of the sun god, so that his body feels as heavy as lead; he then flies for four hours in the talons of an eagle. These episodes, Daniken suggests, are really accounts of a trip in a space craft. A door that speaks with a human voice is obviously a loudspeaker . . . In fact, a careful perusal of the Epic of Gilgamesh reveals that these events do not occur.
Von Daniken also suggests that the Great Pyramid must have been built by ancient astronauts because rope was not known in Egypt at the time it was built; in fact, many tomb paintings depict men using ropes. (Von Daniken also manages to multiply the weight of the pyramid by five.) He insists that the statues on Easter Island must have been built by space men, because carving them and moving them was beyond the technology of the Easter Island natives; but modern Easter Islanders disproved that by carving and erecting a statue for the benefit of the explorer Thor Heyerdahl. The lines drawn on the flat surface of the desert in Peru—known as the Nazca lines—were, according to Daniken, intended as landing strips for space ships; he ignores the obvious fact that the turbulence created by any large craft would destroy the lines, which have remained unchanged since 500 AD only because the desert is windless.
In a later book, Gold of the G
ods, Daniken indulges in actual deceit. He describes in detail how he descended into a vast underground cave system in Ecuador, and examined an ancient library of strange metal leaves engraved with unknown characters. Later exploration of the caves revealed no such library, and when Daniken’s companion revealed that Daniken had not even ventured underground, Daniken himself admitted that this was true, but explained that the writers of books like Gold of the Gods are permitted to embroider their facts.
The result of all this is that Daniken has now been totally discredited, and that the ‘ancient astronaut’ theory associated with his name has few serious supporters. This is a pity, for there is far more convincing evidence than that presented by Daniken. An impeccably scholarly book, The Sirius Mystery by Robert Temple, examines the question of how an African tribe called the Dogon came to know that Sirius is a double star, (since this can only be perceived through an astronomical telescope), and that its companion (Sirius B) is a white dwarf—a ‘collapsed’ star of tremendous density, which rotates on its axis and revolves around Sirius A every fifty years. Temple argues that the Dogon derived their knowledge from ancient Egyptians, who in turn must have learnt it from ‘space visitors’. Opponents of the theory have argued that early white missionaries may have brought astronomical knowledge to the Dogon, but there is not the slightest scrap of evidence for this. The Dogon themselves insist that their knowledge of the Digitaria star (as they call it) is part of their ancient tradition.